Four young scholars met at a conference in 2013, and decided they’d stick together, forming a group to see one another through the stresses and successes of being early career academics. All were Black, and they shared a research interest: counseling and psychology.
One by one, the group’s members reached the milestone that cements any academic career: tenure. Two went up for tenure in 2018, a third last spring. This year was to be Paul C. Harris’s turn. The group thought Harris, an assistant professor in the University of Virginia’s counselor-education program, whose research focuses on Black student-athletes’ college readiness, had as strong a case as any of them.
“It’s your time,” Renae D. Mayes, who will be an associate professor in the counseling program at the University of Arizona this fall, told her friend. “This should be a shoo-in.”
But on January 31, Harris was called into a meeting with his dean and the chair of the Curry School of Education and Human Development’s promotion and tenure committee, and told his case for tenure had been denied. He could, they said, be promoted to associate professor, but on a fixed term.
Harris was “blindsided,” he says. Each of his annual reviews since he’d started on the tenure track at UVa, in 2014, had indicated he was either meeting or exceeding scholarship expectations. His teaching evaluations were stellar, he said. He’d served on the boards of state and national organizations for counselor education, published in a range of journals inside and out of his field, nabbed a few grants. A pretenure letter from his dean in June 2017 indicated he was making “steady and solid progress” toward tenure.
The sands, Harris said, seemed to have shifted under him. He wondered whether he, as a Black scholar focusing on research about Black men, had been judged by a different standard.
The reasoning behind his rejection, Harris and a growing list of supporters argue, is riddled with inaccuracies and assumptions that they can only conclude are racist. They point out that there were no people of color on Harris’s promotion-and-tenure committee or, to his knowledge, on the internal review committee that assessed his dossier. (Harris provided The Chronicle with a list of the members of the promotion-and-tenure committee, and is aware of the identities of two of the three members of the internal review committee. Members of the tenure committee referred The Chronicle‘s requests for comment to a university spokesman.)
Along with the makeup of those committees, Harris’s allies also question whether the members understood enough about Harris’s discipline to evaluate his work. That can be a concern for a scholar in any emerging field, but counseling education — particularly with a focus on Black students — may be particularly susceptible to systemic racism, they say.
“The university rejects the characterization that tenure decisions or any other hiring decisions are racially motivated,” Brian Coy, Virginia’s assistant vice president for communications, wrote in an email to The Chronicle. “As an institution that is constantly working to increase the diversity of our faculty, students, and staff, UVA is committed to an objective tenure-review process that is focused strictly on the applicant’s contribution to research, teaching, and leadership at the university.” Because tenure is a personnel matter, Coy said, he could not comment further.
An ‘Unspoken Algorithm’?
So how did Harris fall short? A February letter from the dean explained an internal review committee’s reasoning. Harris hadn’t published enough, in enough high-quality journals, the committee said. He had published in only one journal with an impact factor since starting on the tenure track, according to the committee, and the work he’d produced in that time had been cited only 27 times on Google Scholar. But those figures were simply inaccurate, Harris says. He had, in fact, published in five journals with impact factors since 2014, and his Google Scholar citation count was 148.
One assertion was particularly troubling to Harris. He had published in the Journal of African American Males in Education, the committee wrote, “which appears to be self-published.” That journal is, in fact, a peer-reviewed publication that Harris and his supporters say has a 23-percent acceptance rate.
Then there were procedural issues: He had, after all, been assured in annual reviews that he was on track for tenure. “In retrospect,” he wrote in his appeal, “there appears to be an unspoken algorithm or hard criteria that one must meet” to be awarded tenure. As one example, he wrote, “I was guided to effectively ignore policy related to which external letters to list in my dossier, and instead to follow a path that was reportedly how Curry’s practices actually work.” (In a 2019 email reviewed by The Chronicle, Harris’s chair in the department of human services, Scott D. Gest, acknowledged that in offering Harris advice on seeking external letters, “I had been relying too much on the specific language in the Curry policy without understanding the actual practices/preferences/traditions in how the committee works.”)
With the encouragement of Mayes and other colleagues, Harris decided to appeal his case to the provost, M. Elizabeth Magill, who upheld the original decision. “The provost’s committee focuses on procedural errors or bias in the school’s evaluation,” she wrote in a May 8 letter to Harris. “We did not find sufficient evidence of these problems in your case.”
With Magill’s decision made, Harris took his case to a faculty grievance committee run by Virginia’s Faculty Senate, which will submit a report to James E. Ryan, the university’s president, who holds ultimate authority in tenure decisions. Harris said the committee told him it expects to finish its report by the end of this month.
While Harris waits, a groundswell of support for his cause has emerged. It began when his wife, a writer, published an essay in Catapult this month titled “Whiteness Can’t Save Us.” A reflection on her experience as a Black mother during a time of national unrest, Taylor Harris’s writing marked the first public mention of her husband’s case.
“My husband knows the ropes. Black people, including Black academics like him, have to be twice as good. Don’t give the university any reason, not half a reason, to find fault with you. After eight years of making the right small talk, of doing what he was told, of publishing and presenting papers, of getting above-average teaching evaluations, of studying Black male student athletes and winning a prestigious grant from the NCAA,” Taylor Harris wrote, “my husband didn’t get tenure.”
Compelled by her writing, one of Paul Harris’s former students wrote an open letter to Magill and Ryan that accrued more than 4,000 signatures before being delivered last week. Another designed a website making Harris’s case, complete with infographics highlighting key points of the professor’s appeal. The hashtag #TenureForPaul took off on Twitter, led by Taylor Harris and with the support of several prominent academics.
Harris said he’s heard from other scholars thanking him for sharing his story. “‘I appreciate you speaking up. This is for me, too,’” he said they’ve written.
“We are just kept trapped in this space of going down this path of silent suffering, and man, now, all of a sudden, I’m happy that I’ve gone public,” he says. “I didn’t realize the implications of doing so, not just for me, but for other people.”
The process, though, has still been painful for Harris. In the wake of the committee’s decision, he said, he finds himself experiencing impostor syndrome — rereading every evaluation he’d been issued, combing through his human-resources file, reasoning that he may have missed something. Magill’s letter dismissing claims of bias was a particular affront. “When you get that, you’re like, ‘OK, was I crazy?’” Harris said. “It’s the essence of gaslighting.”
Complicating Factors
Harris and his supporters also contend that his dossier wasn’t properly contextualized for those deciding whether to award him tenure. Emily Goodman-Scott, an associate professor at Old Dominion University, has written external reviews for several scholars going up for tenure, and as a friend of Harris’s, offered to write an unofficial one for him to be submitted to Virginia administrators.
Among other strong credentials, Goodman-Scott said, Harris has had 19 articles published or in press while at Virginia, 17 of which were written or submitted after he entered the tenure track. Virginia’s lack of transparency, she added, was even more “alarming.” “To get a consistently ‘meeting’ or ‘exceeding’ on your scholarship every year, and then to be denied tenure at the end of that, I can’t make sense of that,” Goodman-Scott said.
Concerns about Harris’s scholarship flagged by the internal review committee, wrote Robert C. Pianta, dean of the Curry School, included “a declining number of publications over time, the mixed nature of the quality of journals in which you published and a decline in the quality of journals over time, and the limited reach or awareness of your scholarly work as reflected in citations and other indices.”
The first point, Harris said, is easily dismissed: In recent years, he’s tended toward qualitative research, which is more time-consuming than the quantitative work he did early in his career. “Anybody really analyzing a case will be able to see how my studies change and what we know takes longer,” Harris said.
Provisions in the Curry School of Education and Human Development’s policy that faculty members’ scholarship would be evaluated in a manner “appropriate to the candidate’s discipline,” Harris said, seemed to have been ignored. Instead, he was seemingly punished for publishing in journals that had low or no impact factors.
Impact factors have long played an important, if controversial, role in assessing scholars’ research, and low ones do not help make the case for tenure. But the field of counselor education is relatively new, Goodman-Scott said. That means that many of its journals don’t have impact factors, and that promotion-and-tenure committees should instead gauge tenure candidates’ scholarship by the acceptance rates of the journals they publish in. And deciding to publish work in journals that are focused on people of color, social justice, or equity issues, Goodman-Scott said, puts scholars like Harris in a difficult position, between publishing in a relevant but less-established journal or a journal that has an impact factor but isn’t the best fit for their material.
Joseph Williams, a colleague of Harris’s at Virginia, said Harris’s work is particularly innovative. “He’s really at the forefront of thinking about, How can we intervene on behalf of student athletes of color at an earlier age in order to increase their likelihood, the probability that they will persist to degree attainment at the collegiate level?” Williams said. “Anytime you’re doing kind of groundbreaking research, it just takes time to develop. It takes time to find a niche. That’s kind of the gift and the curse of actually being a trailblazer: It just takes time.”
Williams said he and other colleagues tried to offer feedback on how Harris’s case was presented to the tenured faculty before the faculty’s vote on whether or not to award him tenure, but he’s not sure whether it was taken into consideration. “How you contextualize someone’s work is extremely important,” he said. “I just know that the outcome seemed to indicate that maybe it wasn’t necessarily contextualized in a way that would have benefited Paul.” It’s a concern not unique to Harris, Williams and Mayes said. Faculty of color often switch from tenure-track to non-tenure-track positions — or opt to work in the field rather than in academe — because they’re concerned their research won’t be valued.
‘Race Is So Much of Our Experience’
At Virginia, 3.7 percent of faculty members are Black, according to 2019 data from the institution’s Diversity Dashboard, while a Pew Research Center study found in 2017 that 6 percent of faculty members nationwide were Black. Virginia’s Curry School is more diverse, with Black faculty members accounting for 12.51 percent of its total, and the counselor-education program where Harris teaches is more diverse still — four of its seven faculty members are Black. Yet, according to Harris and his colleague Joseph Williams, the program has never tenured a Black man. (Williams, an associate professor, received tenure through an expedited review process, having been tenured at his previous institution.)
The workplace environment he finds himself in isn’t overtly racist, Harris said. “Nobody’s calling me the N-word anymore. It’s in these other very dismissive tones and language so subtly that those messages are communicated,” Harris said. There have been “moments in conversations where I’m either cut off, or what I’ve said is minimized,” Harris said, or when well-meaning suggestions about his research agenda wind up “communicating that what I’m doing isn’t enough.”
Harris said he and his colleagues have learned how to handle such incidents. But that, too, is an indication to him of the structural racism he faces. “In some ways, I get upset at myself that I’ve become so good at making people, particularly white people, comfortable, because then it means that I’m not always calling out what I feel every time,” Harris said. “There’s been a label for that if you do, right? The angry Black guy.”
Williams understands his colleague’s situation. “Living in America, I’m conditioned to ask, if Paul was a white professor, would this happen? It’s hard for me not to ask that question because race is so much of our experience,” he said.
Even if Harris is granted tenure, Williams said, he’ll be faced with a difficult question. “Now he has to deal with, ‘He was awarded tenure not based on his merit, but based on the times we live in or based on the fact that he’s Black,’” Williams said. “It’s just an unfortunate position to be in, to work so hard for so long and then have race be kind of thought of as a deciding factor.”
Last week, Pianta, the dean, announced the creation of Office for Equity and Inclusion within the Curry School in an internal email.
“It is abundantly clear that we not only need to advance and expand our current efforts, we need more and new ways of working on social justice, equity, and inclusion particularly,” Pianta wrote. He did not respond to The Chronicle‘s inquiry about Harris’s case.
For Harris, the timing of that announcement, as his own case hangs in the balance, was “quite ironic.” He’s optimistic that the new office will bring about change, but sees it as one in a chain of “symbolic moves” that Virginia and other institutions invoke in times of social pressure.
“We’re gonna name a dorm after a former slave. We’re gonna have this memorial built. We’re going to create this scholarship,” Harris said institutions often say. “All of those are wonderful. But it fails to go the full length of acknowledging and speaking to the specific injustices that actually brought this about.”
